28 February 2011

The First Week of PhyloPic

I announced PhyloPic last week and the response has been great. I launched with ~95 images and we are already up to 170! (Possibly more by the time you read this.) Some of the lineages are becoming pretty complete. Some of the better ones:

(Click on it and check out the Flickr page to find an extremely high-resolution version.)

Of course, other areas of the Tree of Life are not quite so fleshed out. For example, if you look up a plant you'll usually get this. (Or even less if you didn't happen to pick a tracheophyte.) So there is plenty of illustrating left to do.

There is also plenty of programming left to do. You can see a list of major remaining tasks on PhyloPic's BitBucket page. Here are a few, with links to their pages:

7 comments:

Great work, Mike, on putting this site together; and good to see the silhouettes starting to accumulate. Scott's alleged Brachiosaurus altithorax is much more like Giraffatitan brancai, though.

I tried to submit a replacement, but the Submit page at http://phylopic.org/submission/ fails for me (Firefox 3.6.13 on Ubuntu GNU/Linux 10.10) -- I get a green screen with a static progress-bar thingy in the middle, and Error #2046 in a little box at the bottom.

The lineage pages such as http://phylopic.org/name/5689/lineage/ would be greatly improved by adding the actual taxon name at each level, and by moving both that name and the attribution over to the right of the icons, so that the screeenspace is used more economically.